1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for conveying tree-length logs to and into a debarking drum.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wood chipping facilities, so-called chip mills, may be provided on location at pulp and paper mills or off site to produce wood chips from hard wood and/or pine logs for the paper making process. Chip mills receive and process large quantities of logs of varying lengths. Typically, at mills where long wood is processed, a crane is used to unload trees from trucks and transport them to storage piles. During the chipping process, the crane is used to transport logs to a debarking drum. In most conventional systems, an infeed chute is used to direct long wood or tree length logs deposited by the crane into the debarking drum.
However, it can be difficult to feed logs to the infeed chute in the event that both long and short logs are being processed, as the shorter logs may not be evenly grasped by the crane and may drop. In addition, chute-type feeding methods are typically low capacity and necessarily intermittent as the crane must periodically retrieve logs to infeed. Thus, while it would be advantageous to debark and chip tree length wood so that pre-chipping processing is not necessary, the ability to debark tree-length logs has been impaired by the presence of a variety of log lengths, the low capacity of chute-type long wood feeding methods, and the intermittent mode of operation necessitated by crane delivery to a chute.
A further deficiency of prior art methods of feeding logs into a debarking drum is that it is not possible to alter the system once constructed. Accordingly, while certain infeed conditions may be more desirable for some types of wood at some times of year and/or certain conditions may be more desirable for logs of a particular length, conventional log infeed systems can not be adapted to accommodate the particular log length and type which is being processed or the particular debarking drum which is provided.